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DECATUR - David and Eileen Wetzel don't get going in the morning quite
as early as they used to. So David Wetzel, 79, was surprised to hear a
knock on the door at their eastside home while he was still getting
dressed.

Two men in suits were standing on his porch.

"They showed me their badges and said they were from the Illinois
Department of Revenue," Wetzel said. "I said, 'Come in.' Maybe I
shouldn't have."

Gary May introduced himself as a special agent. The other man, John
Egan, was introduced as his colleague. May gave the Wetzels his card,
stating that he is the senior agent in the bureau of criminal
investigations.

"I was afraid," Eileen Wetzel said. "I came out of the bathroom. I
thought: Good God, we paid our taxes. The check didn't bounce."

The agents informed the Wetzels that they were interested in their car,
a 1986 Volkswagen Golf, that David Wetzel converted to run primarily
from vegetable oil but also partly on diesel.

Wetzel uses recycled vegetable oil, which he picks up weekly from an
organization that uses it for frying food at its dining facility.

"They told me I am required to have a license and am obligated to pay a
motor fuel tax," David Wetzel recalled. "Mr. May also told me the tax
would be retroactive."

Since the initial visit by the agents on Jan. 4, the Wetzels have been
involved in a struggle with the Illinois Department of Revenue. The
couple, who live on a fixed budget, have been asked to post a $2,500
bond and threatened with felony charges.

State legislators have rallied to help the Wetzels.

State Sen. Frank Watson, R-Greenville, introduced Senate Bill 267,
which would curtail government interference regarding alternative
fuels, such as vegetable oil. A public hearing on the bill will be at 1
p.m. today in Room 400 of the state Capitol.

"I would agree that the bond is not acceptable, $2,500 bond," Watson
said, adding that David Wetzel should be commended for his innovative
efforts. "(His car) gets 46 miles per gallon running on vegetable oil.
We all should be thinking about doing without gasoline if we're trying
to end foreign dependency.

"I think it's inappropriate of state dollars to send two people to Mr.
Wetzel's home to do this. They could have done with a more friendly
approach. It could have been done on the phone. To use an intimidation
factor on this - who is he harming? Two revenue agents. You'd think
there's a better use of their time," Watson said.

The Wetzels, who plan to speak at a Senate hearing in Springfield
today, recalled how their struggle with the revenue department unfolded.

According to the Wetzels, May told them during his Jan. 4 visit that
they would have to pay taxes at either the gasoline rate of 19½
cents per gallon or the diesel rate of 21½ cents per gallon.

A retired research chemist and food plant manager, Wetzel produced
records showing he has used 1,134.6 gallons of vegetable oil from 2002
to 2006. At the higher rate, the tax bill would come to $244.24.

"That averages out to $4.07 a month," Wetzel noted, adding he is
willing to pay that bill.

But the Wetzels would discover that the state had more complicated and
costly requirements for them to continue to use their "veggie mobile."

David Wetzel was told to contact a revenue official and apply for a
license as a "special fuel supplier" and "receiver." After completing a
complicated application form designed for businesses, David Wetzel was
sent a letter directing him to send in a $2,500 bond.

Eileen Wetzel, a former teaching assistant, calculated that the bond,
designed to ensure that their "business" pays its taxes, would cover
the next 51 years at their present usage rate.

A couple of weeks later, David Wetzel received another letter from the
revenue department, stating that he "must immediately stop operating as
a special fuel supplier and receiver until you receive special fuel
supplier and receiver licenses."

This threatening letter stated that acting as a supplier and receiver
without a license is a Class 3 felony. This class of felonies carries a
penalty of up to five years in prison.

On the department of revenue's Web site, David Wetzel discovered that
the definition of special fuel supplier includes someone who operates a
plant with an "active bulk storage capacity of not less than 30,000
gallons." Wetzel also did not fit the definition of a receiver,
described as a person who produces, distributes or transports fuel into
the state. So Wetzel withdrew his application to become a supplier and
receiver.

Mike Klemens, spokesman for the department of revenue, explained that
Wetzel has to register as a supplier because the law states that is the
only way he can pay motor fuel tax.

But what if he is not, in fact, a supplier? Then would he instead be
exempt from paying the tax?

"We are in the process of creating a way to simplify the registration
process and self-assess the tax," Klemens said, adding that a rule
change may be in place by spring.

David Wetzel wonders why hybrid cars, which rely on electricity and
gasoline, are not taxed for the portion of travel when they are running
on electrical power. He said he wants to be treated equally by the law.

David Wetzel, who has been exhibiting his car at energy fairs and
universities, views state policies as contradicting stated government
aims.

"I'm disappointed that the Illinois Department of Revenue would go
after Mr. Wetzel," Flider said. "I don't think it is a situation that
merits him being licensed and paying fees.

"The people at the department of revenue apparently feel they need to
regulate him in some way. We want to make sure that he is as free as he
can be to use vegetable oil. He's an example of ingenuity. Instead of
being whacked on the head, he should be encouraged."

On Nov. 11, 2005, the day his
small fusion reactor exploded in a shower of sparks and metal
fragments, even physicist Robert Bussard didn’t know what he had
achieved.

For 11 years, the U.S. Navy quietly funded Bussard’s research. It was a
small project with a very large goal: deriving usable energy from
controlled nuclear fusion.

Funding ran out at the end of 2005 and Bussard was supposed to spend
the tail end of the year shutting down his lab. He kept postponing that
in an effort to finish a final set of experiments.

He completed low-power tests in September and October and began
high-power testing of the reactor in November. After four tests Nov. 9
and 10, an electromagnetic coil short-circuited as electricity surged
through it, “vaporizing” part of his reactor, Bussard said, and
bringing his tests to an end.

“The following Monday, we started to tear the lab down. Nobody had time
to reduce the data that was stored on the computer. It wasn’t until
early December that we reduced the data and looked at it and realized
what we had done,” he said.

Bussard said he and his small team of scientists had proven that
nuclear fusion can be harnessed as a usable source of cheap, clean
energy.

But for more than a year now, Bussard has been unable to move to the
next step in his research. At 78, he is in ill health and his
scientific allies fear that the long-sought breakthrough he appears to
have achieved may fade into obscurity before it can be fully developed.

No small part of the problem is that the U.S. Energy Department has a
competing project, and has spent five decades and $18 billion on an
as-yet-unsuccessful effort to solve the fusion puzzle.

“Who would believe that a tiny company based on one person could solve
the riddle that has escaped literally thousands of researchers?” asked
Don Gay, a former Navy electronics engineer and an early “technical
point of contact” in the Office of Naval Research who helped keep
Bussard’s project alive.

But that, Gay and others insist, is what Robert Bussard has done.

Bussard is not a household name, except possibly to “Star Trek” fans.

In 1960, he developed — on paper — the Bussard ramjet, an engine
designed to power space vehicles by collecting hydrogen atoms from the
near-vacuum of space and feeding them into a fusion reactor.

His idea was the basis for the “Bussard collectors” that powered the
fictional space ships in the 1960s television series “Star Trek.”

A decade later, Bussard served as assistant director of the
Thermonuclear Reaction Division of the now defunct U.S. Atomic Energy
Commission. He also worked for U.S. government nuclear laboratories at
Los Alamos, N.M., and Oak Ridge, Tenn., and for TRW Systems.

Along the way, Bussard founded his own small company, Energy Matter
Conversion Corp. — EMC2 — to pursue research into fusion. Bussard aims
to use fusion to produce cheap, inexhaustible, clean energy. Unlike
other forms of nuclear energy, including other methods of fusion,
Bussard’s process does not produce radioactivity.

His fuel of choice is one of the earth’s most common and least exotic
elements: boron.

It can be scooped from the Mojave Desert in California, possibly even
extracted from sea water. Boron is used in the production of hundreds
of products as diverse as flame retardants, electronic flat panel
displays and eye drops.

It’s so common that no country, company or individual could corner the
market on the fuel supply, Gay said.

The process Bussard hopes to perfect would use boron-11, the most
common form of the element. Bussard says his experiments — which
achieved fusion with deuterium, not boron — in November 2005 proved
that the boron process will work.

The boron reactor would be similar to, but more powerful than, the
reactor that blew up in 2005.

Bussard’s reactor design is built upon six shiny metal rings joined to
form a cube — one ring per side. Each ring, about a yard in diameter,
contain copper wires wound into an electromagnet.

The reactor operates inside a vacuum chamber.

When energized, the cube of electromagnets creates a magnetic sphere
into which electrons are injected. The magnetic field squeezes the
electrons into a dense ball at the reactor’s core, creating a highly
negatively charged area.

To begin the reaction, boron-11 nuclei and protons are injected into
the cube. Because of their positive charge, they accelerate to the
center of the electron ball. Most of them sail through the center of
the core and on toward the opposite side of the reactor. But the
negative charge of the electron ball pulls them back to the center. The
process repeats, perhaps thousands of times, until the boron nucleus
and a proton collide with enough force to fuse.

That fusion turns boron-11 into highly energetic carbon-12, which
promptly splits into a helium nucleus and a beryllium nucleus. The
beryllium then splits into two more helium nuclei.

The result is “three helium nuclei, each having almost three million
electron volts of energy,” according to Gay, who has written a paper
explaining Bussard’s research in layman’s terms.

The force of splitting flings the helium nuclei out from the center of
the reactor toward an electrical grid, where their energy would force
electrons to flow — electricity.

This direct conversion process is extraordinarily efficient. About 95
percent of the fission energy is turned into electricity, Gay said.

For years, Bussard had wrestled with a problem: too many electrons were
somehow escaping from his reactor core. That meant too few fusion
reactions to result in a net positive output of power.

“We never quite figured it out until the spring of 2005,” Bussard said.
Then, during tests of a reactor, he suddenly understood the problem.

The magnetic field used to create the electron ball at the core of
Bussard’s reactor core was directing some electrons into the metal
walls of the electromagnetic coil containers and support structures.

It was an “obvious point that we had all missed for over a decade of
working on this,” Bussard said.

It meant he had to design and build a new reactor.

With funds running out, “we banged it together as quickly as we could,”
and began testing in September. Instantly, Bussard saw “impressive and
startling results.” Later analysis would show that the rate of fusion
was 100,000 times higher than in previous tests.

“We got four tests out of it that showed conclusively that we had
solved the electron loss problem,” he said.

That ended on Nov. 11, when the short circuit “blew the machine apart,”
Bussard said.

But Bussard is convinced he had built a reactor that could produce more
power than it would consume, and had found a way, at long last, to
harness fusion as an energy source. That hasn’t persuaded the Navy to
resume funding.

The physics of Bussard’s process is daunting.

“There are only about five people in the United States who understand
this well enough to comment on it,” Bussard said.

When the physicist and his allies asked the Navy to resume funding last
August, top Navy scientists turned for advice to the Department of
Energy, a senior Navy scientist recounted. “There were people in DoE
labs who wrote papers that said this couldn’t possibly work.”

Bussard and his allies are convinced the Energy Department is intent on
stifling any fusion projects that could rival its own.

Bussard provided the Navy a stack of papers explaining his work. Navy
officials “looked at them — not very closely,” the scientist said, and
then had a day-long meeting with Bussard. In the end, the Navy decided
not to support him, the scientist said.

Weeks later, Bussard’s work won the 2006 outstanding technology of the
year award from the International Academy of Science. The academy
called his fusion reactor “a revolutionary radiation-free fusion
process that could change the world as we know it today.”

“Could” is a key word.

Bussard may have proven that his process can use controlled fusion to
produce more energy than it consumes, but he did not achieve sustained
fusion or non-radioactive fusion, nor did he actually produce usable
electricity.

That will require more time and more money, he said.

“From the beginning, we were always funded at one-eighth or one-tenth
of what we really needed,” Bussard said.

As a result, Bussard built tiny reactors. And because his reactors were
small and his money was limited, Bussard had neither space nor funds to
build cooling systems. Instead, to keep his equipment from overheating,
he conducted his experiments using brief bursts of electricity to power
the electromagnets at the heart of his reactors.

Tests lasted “fractions of milliseconds,” according to Gay. But
actually, that’s “a long time from a nuclear perspective,” he said.

Also because of power constraints, Bussard conducted his experiments by
fusing deuterium rather than his preferred boron-11. Unlike boron,
deuterium fusion produces neutron radiation.

Bussard explained his choice: “You need a lot of energy to cause
fusion.” The requirement for “boron fusion is very large — 200,000
volts. Deuterium takes a tenth that much.”

Given the physical limitations of his small reactors and the fiscal
limitations of his budget, “It’s much easier to work with deuterium,”
Bussard said.

Now that he has shown that controlled deuterium fusion is possible, it
is simply a matter of building bigger reactors with bigger power
supplies and cooling systems to demonstrate sustained boron fusion, he
said.

Bussard said his next step is to build a new reactor to replace the one
destroyed in 2005. Ideally, he’d like to build two and use them to
demonstrate to other scientists beyond doubt that his process works.
For that, he says he needs about $2 million.

To build a full-size reactor, Bussard said he needs about $200 million.

“We’ve solved the physics; now it’s time for engineering development,”
Bussard said.

That means developing special reactor hardware, such as high-voltage
power supplies, special transformers and switches that work in
timeframes of sub-milliseconds. Some of that work may be challenging,
“but you don’t have to discover new things,” Bussard said.

For now, a source of money seems to be the hardest thing to find.
Despite repeated appeals by Bussard, Gay and others, the Navy has
declined to continue funding Bussard’s research.

“We tried going to ONR [the Office of Naval Research], but we ran into
a brick wall,” said Larry Triola, a former deputy chief scientist in
the Navy program executive’s office for surface combatants.

During the 1990s, Triola and his bosses hoped that Bussard’s fusion
process could be turned into a revolutionary ship-propulsion system.

“I believe he has demonstrated that it will work,” Triola said. But, he
stressed, that is his personal opinion, not the Navy’s. Convincing
others has not been easy.

“There’s a giggle factor” about Bussard’s process “because of all the
decades the Department of Energy has pushed billions of dollars” into
building fusion reactors the size of small factories that consume vast
amounts of energy, but have yet to produce any, he said.

“They’re never going to make a useful power device for the Navy,”
Triola said. “We need something that will fit on an aircraft carrier.
We would like to put them in submarines and on destroyers. Everything
says we should be able to do that with Bussard’s.”

But the money people aren’t convinced.

“People either don’t believe you or they say, ‘It’s not my mission,’”
Triola said. “The money we’re talking about is spent in an hour or two
in Iraq.”

The Navy spent a total of $14 million during the years it supported
Bussard’s work, said Navy spokesman Jim Boyle.

The decision to stop funding came after careful evaluation, he said.
But Boyle said he did not know what the “evaluation criteria” were or
why the Navy reached the decision it did.

Bussard’s work should be funded, agreed Frank Shoup, director of the
systems engineering institute at the Naval Postgraduate School.

“I’m not an expert” in fusion physics, Shoup conceded, but he has
followed Bussard’s work.

“It relies on a new principle in developing fusion energy,” he said.
“The fuel is totally abundant and cheap, there are no noxious
byproducts like radioactive waste, it doesn’t produce carbon and it
doesn’t pollute.

“The quick answer is, if it works, the payoff is so large it is worth
funding to find out if it works,” he said.

Bussard is getting discouraged.

“The [U.S.] government, I don’t think, is going to do anything,” he
said.

So he has begun to look elsewhere. Last October he published a paper
detailing his work for the 57th International Aeronautical Congress in
Valencia, Spain. In it he named eight countries, including China,
India, Russia and Venezuela, that “could logically develop interest” in
his research.

In November, Bussard presented his work in a 90-minute lecture at the
headquarters of the Internet search engine Google.

The lecture is archived at
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=1996321846673788606 and had
been viewed 87,700 times by early March.

The lecture generated a lot of e-mail, but so far, no funding, Bussard
said. His next effort may be a book-length publication detailing his
fusion work.

Much as supporters Gay and Triola want to see Bussard’s fusion work
resume, they worry about the broadening appeal for funding.

“My concern is China,” Gay said. “If they have more vision than we do,
they could jump on it.”

Triola shares the worry. “I think it’s a matter of engineering now, not
physics any more. Once Bussard gets enough publicity, one of our
not-so-friendly allies, probably the Chinese, will go do it.”

SAN FRANCISCO, March 9, 2007 -- The Anomalies Network today unveiled
the UFOCrawler, one the first of a new breed of search engines
specifically tuned to search for information about the paranormal and
unexplained.

UFOCrawler (www.ufocrawler.com)
was developed to make it easier to conduct advanced research and tap
information and knowledge sources worldwide to form educated opinions
about topics such as UFO Sightings, time travel, conspiracy theories
and anomalies.

Powered by IBM OmniFind Yahoo! Edition enterprise search software,
UFOCrawler helps users precisely target and gather information from
relevant sources, including thousands of documents and files collected
in the vast Anomalies Network archive, as well as multiple global
resources across the Web on topics such as such as ghosts, conspiracy
theories and extraterrestrials. Previously, using a conventional Web
search engine, a search on a term such as Area 51, for example--would
return thousands of irrelevant and inaccurate results.

UFOCrawler helps users more clearly define and target their search to a
particular topic, for instance to search for information about an
aurora sighted over Area 51. UFOCrawler is tuned to search for and
deliver the specific information requested or refine an area of
interest.

"Only through raw information can people form their own opinions about
what is happening out there," said Olav Phillips, founder, the
Anomalies Network. "The questions about the paranormal are some of the
most fundamental questions of humanity. People can't draw conclusions,
make a decision or form an opinion based on a single sighting or event.

UFOCrawler is designed to give users a more holistic view of all the
information sources they need to decide for themselves."

In addition to launching UFOCrawler today, The Anomalies Network is
also introducing numerous site enhancements to enable better
collaboration among users as well as major performance enhancements to
the site.

The site enhancements includes all new content and features to enable
more users to contribute, collaborate and dynamically share information
based on their interests. A new user-driven search and RSS
subscriptions as well as account access also enable users to customize
and view only information of interest to them. The site is also
undergoing major performance improvements including the deployment of
the NetliOne Platform for global site caching powered by Netli, as well
as further network improvements at their state of the art datacenter
hosted by Silicon Valley Web Hosting.

In existence for more than 10 years, the Anomalies Network is the
world's largest online UFO and paranormal community with over a million
pageviews per month. The site is designed to serve as a super archive
to make the location of related information easier. Built almost
entirely on open source software, the Anomalies Network uses the CentOS
Linux distribution, Apache, Tomcat, MySQL and PHP in addition to IBM
OmniFind Yahoo! Edition.

IBM OmniFind Yahoo! Edition is a no-cost, entry level enterprise search
product with Web search services powered by Yahoo! that enables
departments and businesses of all sizes to quickly and easily find,
access and capitalize on information stored within organizations and
across the Web.

About The Anomalies Network
The Anomalies Network (http://www.anomalies.net)
is the world's largest online UFO/Paranormal Community. Originally
formed as the S4 Database more then 10 years ago, The Anomalies
Network, was created to improve the quality of information about UFOs
and the paranormal on the Web. The site provides the world's largest
collection of information about the paranormal, enabling users to
research, contribute information and collaborate with others via forums
and chat.

Betty and Barney Hill were driving from Montreal to New Hampshire on
Sept. 19, 1961, when they claim they were taken aboard a UFO. After
medical exams and verbal interaction, the Hill’s were returned to their
car.

If their story is true, did space aliens abduct the Hills in one of the
most famous UFO cases? Maybe not.

Kansas City writer Mac Tonnies isn’t convinced contact with a UFO has
anything to do with extraterrestrials. Tonnies, author of “After the
Martian Apocalypse,” said if UFOs and their crews exist, they may have
come from right here on Earth.

Tonnies calls them cryptoterrestrials; and he’s writing a book about
them.

“It’s not so much a theory as a hypothesis. It’s a paradigm I suppose,”
Tonnies said. “It’s basically asking why not?”

The government, scientists, and Edward J. Ruppelt – head of the 1950s
Air Force project investigating flying saucers – have all said most UFO
cases are pedestrian. Most. Not all.

“In the conventional wisdom (UFOs) are explainable through atmospheric
effects or psychology,” Tonnies said. “If the real ones exist, it’s
alien spacecraft coming from another star system. I think we’re jumping
the gun on that. The evidence doesn’t support it.”

For evidence, Tonnies looks at the descriptions of UFO occupants,
folklore and the evolution of UFO technology.

“We have these beings with larger than normal slanted eyes, small noses
and mouths,” he said. “They typically lack hair … and have long fingers
– weirdly enough – and long arms. And behavior is often descried in a
way that they might be nocturnal.

“I wonder if this is a species that lives underground. Not that they
evolved underground. If they’re real, they’re obviously an offshoot of
people who went down an evolutionary fork in the road.”

All cultures have their stories of little people and usually these
creatures – elves, fairies, trolls and dwarves – live underground. But
maybe these stories are more than myth.

Scientists found the remains of miniature humans (dubbed Hobbits) in a
cave on Flores Island near Indonesia in 2004. The islanders have
legends of little people who ate the islander’s food and stole their
children. Tribesmen eventually exterminated them.

“Humans lived side-by-side among a diminutive race and we have proof,”
Tonnies said, although he has testimony of his own. “I actually spoke
to a witness who had a face-to-face encounter with small humanoids in
Oregon. They said some interesting things, very cryptic. They were very
human looking, but small.”

Tonnies also questions the apparently superior technology of UFOs. From
the airships of the 1800s to the physics-defying craft of today, UFO
technology keeps just out of our reach.

“It’s kind of one step ahead of us no matter where we are,” Tonnies
said. “With me it suggests subterfuge. Maybe they’re trying to throw us
off the scent because we can’t go to the stars yet.”

If this race of cryptoterrestrials exists – which Tonnies doesn’t make
claim – they’re pretty shy.

“They don’t want to make contact,” he said. “My personal impression is
… they are trying to influence our mythology to benefit them or to at
least prolong their civilization. Obviously they’re not comfortable
with contact.”

Tonnies cites the well-publicized Washington, D.C., flyovers of UFOs in
1952 and the 1980 Rendlesham Forest incident in England where multiple
RAF personnel reported a UFO near a nuclear facility as proof there is
something out there.

“(The evidence) points to a nonhuman intelligence, but not
extraterrestrial,” Tonnies said. “It points to a nonhuman intelligence
feigning to an extraterrestrial intelligence. I’m not claiming this is
the way it is, (but) it’s a viable hypothesis.”

For more of Tonnies’ thoughts on cryptoterrestrials, visit
www.mactonnies.com or his blog, posthumanblues.blogspot.com.

Source: From the Shadows
http://from-the-shadows.blogspot.com/2007/02/author-mac-tonnies-makes-case-for.html

- A PURR-FECTLY INCREDIBLE
TALE DEPARTMENT -

Australia's New Feral Mega-Cats

A few bits of circumstantial evidence suggest to some that feral cats
in Australia are now reaching enormous sizes, equivalent to that of a
small leopard. This sounds incredible: how does the evidence hold up?

Tetrapod Zoology exists in a delicate balance. On the one hand I want
to try and maintain some sort of credibility as a trained scientist,
but on the other hand there is a strong incentive to write about the
fantastic, the incredible, and the bizarre, simply because this is what
generates the hits. More people will read a post about Godzilla or
sasquatch than about tree frogs or small brown passerines, for example.
Like, 15,000 more people. It is partly with this in mind that I have
felt the urge to write the long-promised post on the giant Australian
feral cats. As usual with fringe-type subjects, I know that this
subject is something that will generate extreme scepticism in most
readers - and rightly so given that this idea is perhaps hard to
swallow - but, as usual with these things, having learnt something
about the subject I think that there is some really interesting stuff
here. Regular readers will know that I always try and self-justify my
occasional forays into cryptozoology and associated topics in this way,
mostly out of a massive amount of paranoia. Anyway, to business.

Wherever it is in the world that you live, you've probably heard tales
and reports of mysterious big cats that wander about the countryside
and, generally, go unphotographed and uncaught. Here in Britain people
regularly report big 'black panthers', tan-coloured 'pumas', bob-tailed
'lynxes' and an assortment of smaller spotted and striped cats that
various recall Leopard cats Prionailurus bengalensis and Jungle cats
Felis chaus. These animals are known as ABCs or Alien Big Cats.

As I've tried to get across in previous articles, the whole
'unphotographed and uncaught' thing is not true, and in reality there
are numerous photographs and even several dead bodies demonstrating
that feral alien cats are a reality (Shuker 1995). The idea that
leopard cats, jungle cats, lynxes and even leopards and pumas have
escaped from captivity or been surreptitiously released is not exactly
difficult to accept, and if you think it is I suggest you read up on
the evidence. We also know that peculiar new hybrids are appearing; the
best known of them is the peculiar gracile-limbed Kellas cat,
apparently an introgressive hybrid between feral domestic cats and
Scottish wildcats (Shuker 1990).

For most places that supposedly harbour ABCs, the 'escaped alien'
theory best fits the evidence. However, that hasn't stopped various
researchers from coming up with other theories, and one that has
cropped up again and again over the years is that some of the ABCs
represent a new strain of unprecedentedly large feral cat of the
species Felis catus, the domestic cat. This sounds to me like one of
those poorly founded ideas thought up by someone without much knowledge
of the subject, and like most researchers I have never taken it
seriously. In the standard review work on ABCs, Mystery Cats of the
World, Karl Shuker expressed scepticism of this idea too, noting that
'Even though feral domestics have established themselves throughout the
world, no evidence has been obtained to suggest that F. catus can and
does attain a body size commensurate with sheep- or deer-killing'
(Shuker 1989, p. 53).

However... last year I attended a conference at which Australian
cryptozoologist Paul Cropper gave a talk on Australian ABCs. For me it
was among the most memorable talks of the event, and here's why: he
showed two video clips that both showed large, black cats (large =
apparently exceeding 1 m in total length). But rather than being feral
leopards or any other cat species that exhibits melanism, the weird
thing is that these cats looked like gigantic specimens of F. catus.

The first bit of footage (I've been unable to track down details on
when and where it was filmed: let me know if you can help) showed a big
black cat slinking along a vegetated hillside. The cat appeared to be
very large (I say this based on the size of the surrounding vegetation,
and on the overall look and 'heaviness' of the animal), but its pointed
ears, tail and gait make it look quite different from a leopard or any
other big cat. It also looked nothing like a leopard cat, ocelot,
caracal, lynx, or any of the golden cats. Clearly, what I'm getting at
is hard to quantify, but it was as if someone had super-sized a feral
moggie.

The second video that Paul showed was even more remarkable. We start
with a daytime shot of a perfectly normal grey domestic cat, sat on a
shrub-covered hillside near a stand of trees. Then the camera pans to
the right. From behind the trees slowly emerges a big black cat,
apparently more than twice the size of the grey domestic cat. Yet its
head and face - which we can see in full detail - show without doubt
that it is a domestic cat, with vertical pupils, pointed ears, and a
dainty snout quite unlike the deeper snout of the large cats. Its
shoulder blades appear proportionally big and overall it appears
unusually muscular. The ordinary grey cat, sat not less than two metres
away, is not in the least perturbed by the presence of this monster. I
struggled to understand what I was seeing: was this some sort of trick
using forced perspective?

Filmed in 2001 at Lithgow, New South Wales, by Gail Pound and her
husband Wayne, the video has been the subject of a lot of discussion
and controversy. So far as I can tell there is indeed general agreement
that it really does show a monstrously large, black feral cat that some
people estimate to be about 1.5 m long in total. Here is an extract
from a news article...

"Last year, the NSW government asked a seven-member panel of big cat
experts to view a video shot near Lithgow, west of Grose Vale, of what
appeared to be a large black cat - possibly a panther - in close
proximity to a large feral cat. They concluded that the larger of the
two was a huge feral cat, two to three times normal size. Their
reasoning was only that they did not think a feral cat would be so
close to a panther."

The Lithgow film is not the only decent bit of footage that exists.
Another was filmed at Dunkeld in the southern Grampians, Victoria, in
December 2004 by Andrew Burston. Again, the cat looks very odd: the
profile of the back appears more like that of a small cat than a large
one (Felis cats have a more obviously convex lumbar and pelvic region
than pumas and big cats); its tail appears proportionally too short for
a leopard or puma; and its gait and the shape of its head also look
more like those of a Felis cat than of a puma or big cat. This time we
have an excellent scale bar, as the animal actually walks within a few
metres of an adult kangaroo.

I'm not going to attempt to estimate sizes here (I'm notoriously bad at
doing that), but I conclude that the Dunkeld cat both (1) looks more
like a Felis cat than anything else and (2) is exceptionally big.
Burston estimated its shoulder height at 75 cm, and this doesn't seem
inappropriate. A Melbourne zoo official, Noel Harcourt, went on record
as saying that the animal was a large feral cat and not a leopard or
other exotic species, but didn't comment on the animal's exceptional
size.

Other bits of video footage, and photos, apparently showing
particularly big feral black cats can also be seen on Mike William's
blog Australian Big Cats. Mike has been trying hard to drum up some
serious academic interest in this subject and, as we'll see, there is
good reason to be very, very interested in the evidence he and his
colleagues now have [adjacent image doesn't show the Dunkeld cat, but
an alleged big feral cat photographed by Bob McPherson].

There are always problems in interpreting video footage and photos. Is
the Lithgow cat really as big as it appears to be, or are we being
tricked by some quirk of perspective? Are we jumping to conclusions in
thinking that the kangaroo in the Dunkeld footage really provides a
scale bar for the cat? And it's difficult to judge the size of the cat
in some of the other video clips and photos. You'll be pleased to hear
then, that video footage and photos are not the only evidence we have.
There are also dead bodies.

We'll discuss the least impressive of them first: it's a feral cat that
was shot in Victoria, and Mike has actually produced a video where he
films this skin and the animal's skull. As he states and shows in the
video, the head and body length is 870 mm, and the tail length is 360
mm (giving a combined length of 1230 mm).

For comparison, feral cats from elsewhere are reported to have head and
body lengths of between c. 460 and 522 mm and tail lengths of between
c. 269 and 300 mm (Kitchener 1991), giving a combined length at most of
c. 822 mm. What is alleged to be the world record domestic cat, an
Australian tabby named Himmy, had a total length of 965 mm and
exceptionally big pre-1900 Scottish wildcat specimens had head and body
lengths averaging 639 mm and tail lengths averaging 310 mm (giving a
combined length of 949 mm).

I used pre-1900 data as Scottish wildcats have been declining in size
since that time and the pre-1900 cats were exceptionally big compared
to living ones (Tomkies 1991). Two world-record Scottish wildcats had
combined head, body and tail lengths of 990 and 1100 mm and an English
pet tabby, whom I measured in 1991, had a head and body length of c.
700 mm and a tail length of c. 317 mm (giving a combined length of 1017
mm*). The Australian skin is therefore large, but not exceptionally,
remarkably so. That's not where the story ends though.

* Which either means that Himmy isn't the biggest domestic cat ever or
my measuring was off. Hmm. I have good photos of the cat I measured if
anyone wants to see them (and perhaps try to work out how big the
animal was).

Now for the more impressive specimen. Shot in Gippsland in June 2005 by
Kurt Engel, a deer hunter, this one was apparently about as big as a
leopard at c. 1.6 m long, though only its tail remains extant as Engel
dumped the body in a river (I'm not sure why). There are photos of the
whole body (one of them can be seen at left and another at the top of
the page) but those that have been released so far don't provide any
obvious scale: better photos are apparently to appear in a book. The
tail that Engel retained is 650 mm long and preliminary DNA testing
performed at Melbourne's Monash University indicated that it does
indeed belong to F. catus. If this is correct - it requires validation
- I don't what to say other than... holy crap.

So are feral cats in Australia really growing to amazingly large body
sizes? We can't yet be sure, but the evidence is looking pretty good.
As mentioned, Mike Williams and his colleagues are trying to get
academic scientists more interested in this subject, and as yet the
apparent existence of these giant ferals has gone largely unrecognised
outside of the cryptozoological community. I for one aim to keep up to
date with this subject, and I'll report further developments here at
Tetrapod Zoology. I am planning to attend an ABC conference that's
happening later this month and will post news on that if and when I
attend.

By anyone's standards Edgar Cayce was considered a strange man,
certainly not in the mainstream. According to most accounts, he was
pretty much an unassuming young man, born in 1877 in the community of
Beverly in Christian County, just south of Hopkinsville.

This Kentucky native, who died in 1945, is still considered today, even
in death, one of the world's great psychics in history.

Called the “Sleeping Prophet” because his powers seemed to come only
while asleep or in a self-induced trance. His supernatural powers gave
him unexplainable insight of physical, spiritual and religious
happenings.

Over the years thousands claimed that Cayce was able to successfully
diagnose their illnesses and even prescribe ways to treat them. And he
often did this without actually seeing the patients. Medical doctors
would take Cayce's suggestion and successfully follow through with a
cure.

At the age of 16, Cayce dropped out of school at the end of his eighth
grade year to help support his family. He had set his sites on becoming
a minister, so he soon began teaching a Sunday school class. The year
was 1893.

Two years later Cayce met his future wife Gertrude, whom he married in
1903. He was 26 years old.

Throughout his young life he had several jobs with nothing really
sticking, and his health had even become an issue. Upon losing his
voice, and with physicians unable to help him, Cayce turned to a
magician-hypnotist who was able to return his voice and also introduce
him to trance readings.

Cayce and his wife moved to Bowling Green where they operated a
photography studio. It was here in 1929 when local doctors began to
observe his trance readings and even sticking him with pins while he
was suspended in his sleep-like trance.

He went on to travel the United States, being studied, doing trance
readings and helping to heal the sick. One of those was speculated to
have been President Woodrow Wilson when Cayce was called to Washington
in 1919. The President had suffered a stroke and some thought Cayce's
extraordinary powers were needed in Washington.

As Cayce continued to draw national attention, his life began to
experience several failures. First with a hospital he helped to open in
1928 in Virginia Beach, Va., and then with a university he started.
Both closed in 1931.

Cayce and his family were even arrested in Detroit in 1935 for giving
one of his readings to a child, and he was convicted of practicing
medicine without a license.

At the age of 67, he died on Jan. 3, 1945, and four months later, his
wife, Gertrude followed. Both are buried in Hopkinsville.

There's an opportunity to learn much more about Edgar Cayce.

The Pennyroyal Area Museum will be hosting its 15th Annual Edgar Cayce
Hometown Seminar on Saturday, March 17. The morning speakers include
William T. Turner, a distant relative to Edgar Cayce and the
Hopkinsville/Christian County historian. who will give a slide
presentation and talk on Edgar Cayce and his hometown of Hopkinsville.
Tom L. Johnson, founder and president of The Heritage store at Virginia
Beach, Va. will speak on the topic of Edgar Cayce Updated. He will
convey information about Cayce's holistic remedies and how they are
present in mainstream health care. There will be demonstrations and
samples of holistic health care products.

A tour of local Edgar Cayce sites in Christian County, which includes
his burial site, will follow the morning speakers. Lunch will be
included on this tour. In the evening there will be a performance of
Edgar Cayce: the Gift of the Pennyroyal, written by local playwright
Wayne Goolsby at the historic Alhambra Theatre in downtown Hopkinsville.

For registration and more information contact the Pennyroyal Area
Museum at 270/887-4270 or Pennyroyal.Museum@gmail.com .

The Museum Shop is also well stocked with Edgar Cayce related books and
holistic health care products.

I always find something new and interesting that somehow ends up
agreeing with or adding to my thoughts on many subjects.

Like last weeks C-J, my life has been filled with the number 11. And
after reading the C-J tonight I find that my birthday adds up to 23!

So now I question the significance of both 11 and 23 in my life.
Strange stuff. I would like to try and find out the following…

Are there a lot of people experiencing a high frequency pitch or
ringing in their ears lately?

Did it recently start?

Does it change in presence or volume?

Does it tend to drown out other sounds?

Is it more present during certain parts of the day or night?

I have been hearing the hi-frequency for sometime now. At times it is
so strong that it distracts me. It is not what doctors call the
“classic” ringing in the ears.

As a matter of fact I will pin down the exact frequency or pitch and
tell the C-J group. But for now I would like to know if there are a lot
of people experiencing the same thing.

Note that there is a TV commercial that started appearing recently
advertising “LIPOFLAVONOID” for ringing in the ears! Is there a
connection all of the sudden? Are we being exposed to some kind of
secret hi-frequency tests?

Could this be part of the “mind attack” subjects that the C-J has
covered recently? I would appreciate any feedback on this subject.

Maybe C-J can dig up some interesting details.

Thank you!
Doug
dtaylor799@nc.rr.com

If any of our readers have any info for doug, please e-mail him, or
send your comments to us at Conspiracy Journal, conspiracyjournal@hotmail.com

-
THIS DOESN'T HELP DEPARTMENT -

Taking on the Alien Invasion

According to recent polls, almost 50 percent of Americans and millions
of people around the world believe that UFO's are real. An alien race
invading planet Earth and taking over – it's an idea so powerful, it
has drawn millions into movie theaters.

But isn't that kind of stuff pure fantasy? Not to Seattle inventor
Michael Menkin.

"We are being invaded right now," he said. "And they're taking children
as well as adults."

Menkin, a brilliant technical writer who's worked for Boeing and NASA,
has spent much of his life gathering evidence of alien abductions.
Among the most disturbing are dozens of drawings by a 9-year-old Texas
girl named Ariel who first began drawing aliens five years ago.

Ariel has tried to illustrate telepathic communications and she has
drawn pictures of herself on an examination table, aliens coming for
her brother, and she playing with little alien babies.

Her mother Joni felt afraid, because she too she says has been
frequently abducted by aliens.

"This may sound crazy, but I also have memories and I have memories of
this baby being removed from me, being taken more than once," she cried.

What we do know is that there are as many as 3 million Americans who
believe they've encountered aliens and among hard-core believers, one
frightening theory for these visits comes up over and over again.

"What the aliens are planning to do is put their own race on our
planet, so their process now is to create that race that uses some
human genes mixed with their genes, as fantastic as the story sounds,"
said Menkin.

The babies Ariel drew, Menkin says, are all hybrids – part human, part
alien.

"They start taking children when they're a very young age," he
continued. "They actually have these children play with their hybrid
children to teach these hybrids how to be humans."

Because mainstream science has scoffed at such ideas, Michael Menkin
has decided to take the aliens on himself. His weapons: a hair dryer,
leather helmets and $200 rolls of an antistatic product called Velostat.

"Right now the Thought Screen Helmet is the only thing the entire human
race has to stop the aliens," he said.

The secret is in the Velostat. Menkin says it jams alien telepathic
communication.

"People wear this and when they wear it, the aliens cannot communicate
with them and it actually works better than I thought it would," he
said. "I found that in a lot of cases the aliens don't even come down
when they wear the hat."

To date, Menkin has sent more than 50 thought screen helmets around the
world. He says they're free.

"I'm not making any money off this," he said.

Joni also wears one of the hats. She says she no longer feels afraid.
Ariel also wears a helmet.

Menkin says he gets ridiculed a lot.

"My strategy is, if I keep making more hats and keep finding more
abductees with hats, then I get more evidence and that's exactly what's
happening," he said.

Menkin isn't giving up.

"I'm 100 percent convinced," he said. "I work almost every weekend
either making baseball caps or leather hats, so I must be convinced."

Ever since "Close Encounters" enchanted moviegoers in the 1970s,
scientists and UFO-believers alike have been dreaming of the contact
experience.

Menkin came by his fascination with "things interplanetary" at a young
age.

"My father was the creator of Captain Video, which was the first
science fiction television show which ran from 1949 to 1956," he said.

At its peak, more than 125 stations carried the program.

He also read science fiction. In fact, it was Doc Smith's 1951 classic
"Gray Lensman" that gave Menkin the idea to develop thought screen
helmets.

Michael Menkin wants to wake up the world. He says it's already
happening.